Check Out the New 'Motion Poster' for The Boxtrolls

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Check Out the New 'Motion Poster' for The Boxtrolls

Here be monsters! Well, OK, not really monsters so much as lovable little creatures that inhabit sewers and live off garbage and their own ingenuity. More specifically still: They're Boxtrolls, and they're the heart of Laika's next stop-motion animated film. The Boxtrolls tells the story of an orphaned baby taken in by a kindly community of trash hoarders who name the child Eggs and raise him in their subterranean world. And today these adorable critters are getting a don't-try-this-at-home (seriously, never stick a fork into any kind of electricity-powered device, kids) motion poster of their very own.

The Boxtrolls features the voices of Isaac Hempstead-Wright (aka Bran Stark on Game of Thrones) as Eggs, Elle Fanning as Winnie, and Sir Ben Kingsley as the villainous Archibald Snatcher, with additional characters voiced by Simon Pegg, Toni Collette, Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, and Tracy Morgan. But even with all that amazing star power, it sounds like the directors of Boxtrolls barely made a dent in the wealth of story provided by the source material.

"It all originated with a children's book by Alan Snow called Here Be Monsters!," co-director Graham Annable told WIRED during Comic-Con International. "It's an incredible book, but it's huge and it's got a new idea and a new character almost every page. It was a huge wrinkle for us to try to refine this incredibly imaginative world that Alan had created down into something we could truly tell in an 85-minute animated feature."

And with stop-motion animation, a million little characters means about a billion teeny, tiny little parts that need to be repositioned every time a character moves. An endeavor like this takes years to complete. Annable notes that for the studio's first feature, Coraline, its star Dakota Fanning contributed voice work over the course of eight years as they built and shot the movie. Luckily, technology—particularly 3-D printing—is making everyone at Laika's job a whole lot easier.

These days the Laika crew, under the leadership of CEO Travis Knight, is using those new techniques in a way that means they don't have to hand-craft every single mouth and eyeball and puppet eyebrow. Now animators can snap facial expressions on and off models quickly, turning a frown upside down much faster than before. It's a method that has made the entire filmmaking process much faster. For example, Hempstead-Wright's voiceover work for Eggs spanned about three years, which isn't a paltry stretch, but is still a dramatic streamlining of time and resources compared to Laika's first undertaking.

"Travis' idea is to use this old form of animation, this old form of filmmaking that's been there since the dawn of cinema, [and] to bring it into the modern world and update it using the latest technology," says Annable's co-director, Anthony Staachi. "I think that Coraline sort of knocked on the door, ParaNorman pounded on the door, and then the Boxtrolls kicked the door open. It's really a hybrid movie that mixes all the different elements together, and the next movie is going even further."

Check out the motion poster for The Boxtrolls, which hits theaters Sept. 26, above. (And can we just say that the motion poster is a highly under-utilized promotional vehicle, and vastly superior to Hollywood's flirtation with the tweaser? Remember the Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Mockingjay motion posters? Those were amazing, and we want more.)